First published in 1898, Chekhov’s “A Doctor’s Visit” has been ably adapted as a short play by
physician-playwright, Guy Fredrick Glass. In addition to the original
characters, in his adaptation Glass has added a new character, a medical
student, Boris, as a foil and interlocutor for the work’s main character, Dr.
Korolyov. Staging directions and scene setting also add dramatic dimensions to
the story, as do elaborations of conversations including comedic encounters with the governess, Christina Dmitryevna, and a display of "compassionate solidarity" (see Coulehan annotation ) with the
doctor’s patient, Liza. The primary theme of the story stays true in this
adaptation—Korolyov’s impressions of the patient viewed from a cold objective
stance are changed as he develops personal insights into the social and
political nature of her (and his) malaise.

The play has two characters: Ruth and Friend (who is a male doctor).Ruth is an engaging, straight-talking quadriplegic who can zip and dance with her chin-operated wheelchair and takes delight in terrorizing medical staff both physically and verbally. She wants to write poetry and is waiting for a device to make it possible for her to use a computer. She keeps developing bedsores that threaten her life and require long admissions to the hospital before they will heal. She desperately wants to live no matter what happens, as she feels that having no mind would be worse than having no body.Friend is a male doctor with children who is ashamed of having examined her while she was unaware. Burdened with his guilt, he asks to be her “friend.” Ruth is skeptical and runs circles around him, but eventually comes to trust him and believe in his sincerity.She makes him a witness to her advance directive to instigate all heroic measures, as she is afraid of the kindly "ethical" and cost-effective arguments not to treat the disabled. But Ruth dies horribly from sepsis, and Friend is helpless to prevent it. She never obtains the device that would have allowed her to put her poems into printed words.

Evan Hansen, an awkward, lonely high school senior, struggles
with Social Anxiety Disorder. On the
advice of his therapist, he pens supportive letters to himself:
“Dear Evan Hansen, Today is going to be an amazing day, and
here’s why. Because today all you have
to do is be yourself. But also
confident.”

Connor, another loner student, picks up one of Evan’s
letters and, several days later, commits suicide. When Connor’s parents find the letter, they take
it to be their son’s suicide note. Instead
of dissuading them, Evan concocts an account of a close friendship with the
classmate he barely knew, creating an email trail. Connor’s family swallows the
story.

As Evan gains the attention he has always craved and comes
out of his shell, he finds that he cannot stop himself. He
founds the “Connor Project,” an organization dedicated to preserving his “friend’s”
memory where he shares his musings on social media: “Have you ever felt like nobody was
there? Have you ever felt forgotten in
the middle of nowhere? Have you ever
felt like you could disappear? Like you
could fall, and no one would hear? ...Well, let that lonely feeling wash
away…Lift your head and look around. You
will be found. You will be found.” Once Evan’s postings go viral, the Connor
Project becomes a veritable industry, with a budget, and fans who look to it
for inspiration. As the stakes rise, the
Project can flourish only by being fed more lies.

This annotation is based on a live performance presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New
York City that ran between April and June of 2016. The play was nominated for a 2016 Tony Award for best play, and Frank Langella won the 2016 Tony Award for best
performance by an actor in a leading role in a play. In supporting roles were
Kathryn Erbe, Brian Avers, Charles Borland, Hannah Cabell, and Kathleen
McNenny.

The Father is the story of an older man with
Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his
own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing
home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright,
Florian Zeller, who told The Guardian
(2015), “The Father is about an old man lost in the labyrinth of his mind.” The
objective of the play is to bring audience members into the actual dementia
experience so that rather than witnessing André’s disorientation they feel his disorientation.

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience
experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated
scene sequences, and time loops as contexts for various symptom manifestations
like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take
place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat,
and a nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the
supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In
different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the
audience.

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him
she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of
the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had
moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other
scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts
time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the
disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a
given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with
the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted
for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s
hallucinations.

The play does not keep audience members in a
perpetual state of confusion and despondency. Farcical elements are peppered
throughout that produce occasional laughs, such as when Anne contests André’s
account of a previous conversation, he suggests it’s she who has the memory
problem:
“You’ve forgotten. Listen, Anne, I have a feeling
you sometimes suffer from memory loss. You do, I’m telling you. It’s worrying
me. Haven’t you noticed?”

The play is set in 1947 (the year it premiered) in New
Orleans. Having lost their ancestral
Mississippi home to creditors, Blanche Dubois arrives at the shabby French
Quarter flat of her sister Stella. When
we first meet Blanche she explains she is on a leave of absence from teaching
high school English on account of her “nerves.” From her first meeting with
Stella’s husband Stanley Kowalski, a World War II vet, we detect class conflict
and sexual tension between the two of them. As Blanche’s visit becomes more and more protracted, Stanley becomes
increasingly suspicious of her motives and background. Meanwhile, she begins to date Mitch, one of
Stanley’s poker buddies. Gradually we learn more about Blanche’s checkered past.
She was once married to a young man who committed suicide after she discovered
him in a sexual encounter with another man. Stanley uncovers rumors that she was fired from her teaching job for
having sex with a student. As the play
progresses, fueled by her surreptitious drinking, Blanche’s mental state
unravels. When Stanley warns Mitch about Blanche’s notorious reputation, Mitch
rejects her. Adding insult to injury,
while Stella is having a baby, Stanley rapes his sister-in-law. Blanche’s emotional deterioration is complete. In the final scene, a doctor and nurse arrive
to take Blanche to a mental hospital. She initially resists them, but when the doctor helps her up she
willingly surrenders: “Whoever you are - I have always depended on the kindness
of strangers"(p. 178).

4:48 Psychosis was the last work of controversial British
playwright Sarah Kane. In 1999, soon
after her twenty-eighth birthday, having completed the play, she took her own
life.

Naturally, these tragic circumstances can never be far from
the reader’s mind. But to dismiss 4:48 Psychosis as a suicide note is to negate
Kane’s achievement. The play was, in
fact, meticulously researched and carefully written. Kane’s first play, Blasted,
had considerable shock value, and throughout her short career she pushed the
boundaries of what might be considered stageworthy. 4:48 Psychosis is both the
final product of a life marked by recurrent episodes of depression (the play
gets its name from the time she found herself waking up every day during the last episode) and the final
chapter in her writing’s progression towards disintegration. It represents her
deteriorating mental state, but is also a conscious stylistic decision.

The text of 4:48 Psychosis is unrecognizable as a conventional
play. The author has left neither stage
directions nor an indication of the number or gender of performers. Words and
numbers appear to be arranged ornamentally on the page. However, meaning that
is not apparent emerges from the chaos, as in the way that sense may be
made from a psychotic mind. The numbers
are not random, but “serial 7’s” from the mental status exam. Quotations from the Book of Revelations appear
side by side with excerpts from a medical chart, and extracts from self-help
books are interspersed with dialogue between a patient and her
psychiatrist. The latter provides an
illustration of the patient’s attempt to reconcile her anger with her
neediness: “I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing”
(p. 214). We learn too of her struggle with self-mutilation and her suicidal
impulses, and follow her moods from dark humor to despair to hopefulness. Indeed, the last line of the play, “Please
open the curtains” (p. 245) appears to leave open the possibility that she will
pull through. That option was
unfortunately not the one the author chose for herself.

Meet the Goodmans, (father Dan, mother Diana, daughter
Natalie) who on the surface resemble a “perfect loving family” like any one of
millions. However, from the outset we
see that they are, in fact, a hair’s breadth from collapse: Diana’s long-term struggle with bipolar disorder
leaves her suffering uncontrollable mood swings. Her illness fuels the chronic tension in her
relationships with husband and daughter.
In addition, we learn that a son (Gabe), whom we initially believe to be
an active family member, actually died years ago and his appearances represent
Diana’s hallucination.

As the show begins, Diana is undergoing a hypomanic episode that
is resistant to treatment by her psychopharmacologist. Discouraged by side effects and egged on by
her phantom son, Diana flushes her pills down the toilet. As she deteriorates, she visits a new
psychiatrist who agrees at first to treat her without medication. As she begins in psychotherapy, for the first
time, to accept the loss of her son, she descends to a new clinical low. At the close of the first act, after making a
suicide attempt, she is hospitalized and agrees to be treated with ECT.

By Act II, the ECT has effected great clinical improvement,
with stabilization of Diana’s mood and no further hallucinations. All this, however, has come at the expense of
her memory. As it returns, she becomes
aware that what she most needs to remember, and process, are her feelings about
losing a child. In fact, we learn that she
was kept from expressing them at the time because of concerns she might
decompensate. She struggles to make
sense of all of this while remaining stable.
When she confronts Dan about Gabe, it is he who appears unable to
discuss their loss. She suddenly becomes
aware that Dan has been enabling her in an unhealthy way. She reconciles with her daughter, but realizes
that in order to move forward she needs to get out of her dysfunctional marriage. However, the door is left open on this
relationship, for at the recommendation of her psychiatrist Dan enters
psychotherapy.

New York, 1981. As
the play opens, Ned Weeks sits outside a doctor’s office with a friend who has
developed worrisome symptoms of a mysterious “plague” that strikes
homosexuals. The doctor, Emma Brookner,
complains that she cannot make headway in getting the gay community to take the
threat seriously. This encounter
inspires Ned, a writer, to dedicate himself to becoming the spokesman for the
growing ranks of disenfranchised patients. He attempts to convert others to his
cause, including his heterosexual brother, a closeted bank executive, and a reporter
for the New York Times (whom he begins to date). When it becomes clear that the City is not
interested in assisting, he co-founds a grassroots activist organization. As the epidemic veers out of control, the man
he loves falls ill as well. Over time,
Ned’s abrasive, confrontational approach, as well as his focus on abstinence,
makes him many enemies within the gay community. Ultimately, he is forced out of his own
organization. At the same time, there
are hints that, as a result of his work, the disease is beginning to be taken
seriously. At the end of the play, Ned’s
lover Felix becomes the latest gay man to succumb to the epidemic.

In a dramatic monologue, Joanne traces the devastation of a familial proclivity to breast cancer through four generations of women: her grandmother Sarah; her mother; Joanne herself and her two daughters, one of whom is also Sarah.

Joanne’s mother and grandmother both died very young of breast cancer; however, many other family members vanished in the Holocaust and the number of familial cancer deaths is insufficient for her to qualify for genetic testing. Her friend Linda, also a mother of two daughters, learns too late that she carries the BRCA gene; she urges Joanne to be tested.

Tormented by not knowing and equally tormented by what should be done if the test is positive—both for herself and her daughters, she convinces a doctor to lie so that the test can be performed. It is positive; Joanne opts for bilateral preventative mastectomies. During a visit to the gravesite of her mother and grandmother, she begins to explain the genetic risk to her daughters.

The conventional, young, corporate executive, Ross Gardiner, is sentenced by a judge to pay weekly visits to the recently widowed and childless Mr. Green. Ross had knocked the elderly gentleman down when he stepped out into the road without looking. No real damage was done, but the judge decided that Ross had been driving too fast.

Neither man wants to be anywhere near the other. Mr Green sends Ross packing, and the younger man appeals to the judge for a different punishment, without success. He therefore returns bringing the peace offering of soup from a kosher deli that the passive-aggressive senior grudgingly devours. “Would I waste good food?” Their common Jewish identity makes everything better for Mr Green, although Ross does not care. For Mr Green the Jews are a people who suffered intolerance and murder and must stick together now.

They begin to tell stories of their lives. Mr Green grievously misses his wife who did all the cooking and cleaning; “we never argued once in sixty years.”

Things slip back again when Mr Green learns that Ross is gay. Negotiating that shock is facilitated by the older man’s bafflement over how Ross’s father has abandoned and derided him; they slowly grow closer. Mr Green wants Ross to find a nice girl and be happy as he was. Ross patiently explains how that cannot work for him.

Then another crisis erupts when Ross learns that the Green’s had a daughter who married a Gentile for which crime she was shunned by her parents as if she had died. It is compounded by the shocking discovery that Green’s wife had been writing to her daughter for thirty years without telling her husband.